Re: [License-discuss] Open Source Eventually License Development
On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Rick Moen r...@linuxmafia.com wrote: I am asking this mailing list for help crafting a proprietary license. It is certainly ironic but not at all off-topic. Speaking for myself (and I am only a friendly hanger-on to OSI), I have no problem with you asking. However, I doubt OSI has relevant expertise, and would not be surprised if OSI Board members both have other priorities and are wary of involvement in proprietary software licensing. For what it is worth, I have no significant objection to at least preliminary discussion happening here; as Rick said, if you're very sensitive to noise, license-review is the correct list for you. That said, if the discussion does get serious/time-consuming, despite a list consensus that it is non-free, I may ask it to move elsewhere. Luis ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
[License-discuss] Minor change to website
Apologies in advance if this is the wrong list -- I was looking at the Open Source Licenses page (http://opensource.org/licenses) and had one moment of ambiguity -- the headings are Popular Licenses and Other Approved Licenses. I found the word other to be misleading; the licenses that are listed under Popular are also on the page for Other licenses - as they should be, but the word other suggests they wouldn't be. Should other be changed to All perhaps? Pam -- Pamela S. Chestek, Esq. Chestek Legal PO Box 2492 Raleigh, NC 27602 919-800-8033 pam...@chesteklegal.com www.chesteklegal.com ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Open Source Eventually License Development
Ghostscript is now AGPLd, for what its worth... On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 9:51 AM, Lawrence Rosen lro...@rosenlaw.com wrote: Fred Trotter wrote: First, I would like for the OSI and FSF people on this list to consider some kind of new status for a license, like OSI tolerated or OSI Not Open Source But It Doesn't Suck , or Not Free Software but tolerated for this purpose or something like. Hi Fred, I actually like the Ghostscript/Aladdin license, which was essentially GPL-after-one-year. I was their attorney at the time and I fully supported their business and licensing model. (For what it is worth, so did my client's friend, Richard Stallman, who apparently considered this a reasonable way then to end up with GPL software.) That said, you should note that the Ghostscript commercial licensor no longer uses the time-delayed open source model. You should perhaps talk directly to the folks at Artifex to understand their experience with it. In any event, you are free to use this model if you want to! Your suggestion for a special OSI/FSF license category suffers from another problem: Several of the licenses on the current OSI list (including some licenses recommended by automated license recommendation tools touted around here) already are Open Source But They Suck Anyway. OSI and FSF both have proven to be sometimes bad judges of license suckiness. Such categories won't help much, given the wide differences of opinions and business models around here. /Larry Lawrence Rosen Rosenlaw Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com) 3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482 Office: 707-485-1242 Linkedin profile: http://linkd.in/XXpHyu -Original Message- From: fred trotter [mailto:fred.trot...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, July 29, 2013 2:12 AM To: license-discuss@opensource.org; Michael Widenius; ka...@gnome.org; mark.atw...@hp.com; Eben Moglen; r...@gnu.org Cc: nat...@gonzalezmosier.com; Roberto C. Rondero de Mosier Subject: [License-discuss] Open Source Eventually License Development snip ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss -- Director of atypical intellectual property, Google Inc. Our open source and developer programs can be found at http://developers.google.com/open-source/ Site, Bio, Pics: http://dibona.com Google Plus: https://google.com/+cdibona Twitter: @cdibona ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Open Source Eventually License Development
[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider [ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, [ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. Unfortunately the open source world has not been very amenable to things that stray beyond the scope of fairly narrow definitions of open source. There is a misunderstanding here. I don't support open source and I don't follow a definition of open source. I launched the free software movement. The basic idea of the free software movement is that software must respect the users' freedom. If a program is not free software, it is an injustice and should not exist. Trying to persuade me to relax our standards of freedom in the name of open source is like asking Edward Snowden to stop publishing leaks in the name of national security. It's a fundamental conceptual confusion and a non-starter. Thus we have nothing equivalent to Creative Commons for software that would cover not just CC-BY and CC-BY-SA but also NC, ND and in your case some kind of time delay license. Any license which had restrictions comparable to NC or ND would fail to respect users' freedoms, so it would not be a free software license. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Open Source Eventually License Development
Eben Moglen scripsit: Whatever the truth of the adage may be, the point for us is that none of this has anything to do with licensing. Fred Trotter was actually asking a question, to which the correct answer is: You don't need a license to make something free software at a certain date in the future. Giving a copy to an appropriate agent, with written instructions to publish under, e.g. GPLv3 or ASL 2.0 on the future date, is quite sufficient. Any number of reliable intermediaries for such purposes exist, and would provide the service gratis. This procedure is not equivalent, except in the long run, to the kind of license Fred Trotter wants, because its effect on particular copies is different. Suppose that Alice sells Bob the source code to Yoyomat, a proprietary program with delayed GPL. After the term has passed, Bob may now distribute *that very copy* of Yoyomat freely to Charlie under the terms of the GPL. In the scenario you outline, he may not; he must obtain a new copy from the escrow agent. This isn't a matter for copyright licensing, because licenses are, in J.L. Austin's term, performative utterances. They are present acts of permission, not declarations of future intention, like testaments. But surely the conditions associated with the permission may include the effective date. If I post a sign on my land today saying Hunting and fishing permitted to all after September 15, 2013, then I may revoke that permission at any time, but if I *don't* revoke it, surely anyone can hunt or fish provided it is after the date mentioned. There's no point in a copyright holder writing a license that says these are the terms today, and those will be my terms tomorrow. The transaction costs of doing so are lower. Granted, I could take down the existing No hunting or fishing sign on September 15 and put up a Hunting and fishing permitted to all sign, but perhaps I won't be there on that day. -- He played King Lear as though John Cowan co...@ccil.org someone had played the ace. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan --Eugene Field ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Open Source Eventually License Development
On Wednesday, 14 August 2013, John Cowan wrote: This procedure is not equivalent, except in the long run, to the kind of license Fred Trotter wants, because its effect on particular copies is different. Suppose that Alice sells Bob the source code to Yoyomat, a proprietary program with delayed GPL. After the term has passed, Bob may now distribute *that very copy* of Yoyomat freely to Charlie under the terms of the GPL. In the scenario you outline, he may not; he must obtain a new copy from the escrow agent. No, Mr Cowan, that's a charming idea, but it's completely wrong. These are non-exclusive licenses we are discussing. Everyone is permitted to copy, modify and redistribute the licensed work on the stated free terms. Surely you don't suppose that the licensor could successfully sue for infringement, after publishing a non-exclusive free license, because of further copying or modification of a pre-existing copy of the very same bits? (You will also notice the complete inconsistency between the operation of your proposed doctrine and the first sale rule.) My described conveyance is, in every respect, legally identical to what Fred Trotter was asking about. Really, you can trust me to know how free software licenses basically work. Eben -- Eben Moglenv: 212-461-1901 Professor of Law, Columbia Law School f: 212-580-0898 moglen@ Founding Director, Software Freedom Law Centercolumbia.edu 1995 Broadway (68th Street), fl #17, NYC 10023softwarefreedom.org ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Open Source Eventually License Development
Fred, fred trotter wrote at 03:52 (EDT): I have been burned pretty badly by people who literally rewrote sections of the GPL to suit them and still called it GPL that I know that some people will try those shenanigans. The FSF is quite vigilant about handling situations like this -- it's one of the reasons that the GPL text itself is still under a copyright license that forbids modification -- so that situations like this can be dealt with. Please report any such issues to the FSF at license-violat...@fsf.org. I hope you so-reported them at the time you encountered them. But, I think that issue is somewhat off the point here: you're talking there about people who are attempting to mislead the public by illegitimately modifying a license text. I doubt the behavior of such people would be curtailed by a packet of license templates that help build proprietary-but-eventually-liberated-code business models. As has been noted in this thread, such business models have been experimented with since the early 1990s, and most software freedom advocates find them, at best, problematic compromises, and, at worst, scourges upon our community. if every person who benefited indirectly from the GNU compiler would donate one cent to FSF and one cent to the OSI per year, neither organization would have any problem paying the bills. People don't pay because that is the norm in our development culture, this mechanism could change that. Non-profit fundraising is always going to be difficult for orgs like FSF and OSI, but that's not an argument for violating principles that our community is based on: permission to redistribute with no royalty nor any payment upstream is a fundamental tenant of software freedom. While Free Software licenses should never discriminate *against* charging for distribution, it's just not Free Software if there's a *mandate* to charge money. Also, note that so many volunteers to the FSF give code rather than pennies. That's often much more valuable a contribution, anyway. Could someone who knows the story well related what problems the people on the other side had? I can speak from my personal experience with these business models. During the Ghostscript era, when I was first working at the FSF, I saw that few people wanted to contribute to GNU Ghostscript. Most people just waited to see what Aladdin would do next, since they knew it'd be released under GPL eventually. This curtailed the usual culture of Free Software development. Since that practice ended for Ghostscript, there have been a myriad of business models attempting to do this sort of thing, and they all suffer from that fundamental flaw: there's no way build a proper community of developers around a Free Software codebase when there's an incentive to wait N months and see what the primary proprietary developer liberates. Free Software licenses -- particularly copyleft ones -- are designed to create equal footing for all community participants. Anytime one contributor to the codebase has more power than everyone else (usually, due to holding all the copyrights and operating under terms *other* than the primary Free Software license for the project), it creates serious flaws of all sorts in the community around that project. -- -- bkuhn ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Open source license chooser choosealicense.com launched.
Sorry for posting a month late on this thread [I hadn't poked into the folder for this list in some time], but I didn't see a consensus and wanted to add my $0.02. Luis Villa wrote on 16 July: In the long-term, I'd actually like OSI to promote a license chooser of its own. But in the meantime I'm pretty OK with linking to a variety of license choosers. Richard Fontana pointed out in his OSCON talk that license choosers generally make political statements about views of licenses. He used the GitHub chooser as an example, which subtly pushes people toward permissive licenses. I was told GitHub's chooser accepts patches, and I was planning at some point to try to patch out this bias myself and see if my patch was accepted -- but of course any patch I produce is going to have subtle copyleft biases -- which I think was Fontana's point. (Fontana, do I have that right?) Therefore, I think OSI should likely avoid license chooser lest OSI end up in the quagmire of taking a position in the copyleft/permissive debates. -- -- bkuhn ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
